This past week, a tiny internet furor erupted over advertisements in books, stemming, it seems, from an article in the Wall Street Journal. (It’s behind a paywall, but I managed to read a cached version, thanks to Google. Thanks, Google!) Frankly, I just don’t see what the big deal is. We accept that ads are necessary to support television, newspapers, and even films – why not books? And authors see so little money, except for the big popular ones of course, that it makes sense for them add additional “revenue streams.”

All happy families are alike, except those that take Paxil, because they’re even happier than happy families, and much much happier than unhappy families, which are each unhappy in their own way, and should consult their doctor(s) about taking Paxil.

But I never trust my own judgment, so I thought I’d ask a few of my “author friends” what their opinions were. Well let me tell you it was very disappointing not to hear back from Mr. Pynchon, or Tommy as I like to call him. He was high on my list, because I thought the opening of Gravity’s Rainbow offered awesome possibilities for product placement.

Consider:

“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to, except perhaps the sound of the liquid-cooled inline four-cylinder engine of a pearl orange/light metallic gray Honda CBR1000RR.”

Pretty snappy, I say. Perhaps it even has a little more “voom” than Mr. Pynchon’s original phrasing, as esteemed as it may be. But I digress. Not having heard back from Mr. Pynchon, I thought perhaps a fellow I like to call Jay-Dizzle might be interested in divulging his thoughts on the matter. You, of course, know him as J.D. Salinger, and you probably also know he died rather recently (respect!), which I didn’t, and which really threw me for a loop, because I was sure he would take to the idea like a rabbit to water.

Since, however, he has exited “this mortal coil,” I don’t imagine he’d mind if I speculate as to how improved his prose might have been (and still could be, given the right, ahem, legal circumstances) through the use of judicious product placement. One possibility, from Catcher in the Rye:

“I certainly began to feel like a Preakness Stakes-winning horse’s ass, though, sitting there all by myself. There wasn’t anything to do except smoke Camel Silver Super Lights and drink Bacardi and Coke. What I did do, though, I told the waiter to ask old Ernie if he’d care to join me for a drink – perhaps a Tanqueray and Schweppes Tonic. I told him to tell him I was D.B.’s brother. I don’t think he ever even gave him my message, though. Those bastards never give your message to anyone, which is why I normally like to use my iPhone 4, which changes everything. Again.”

Whatever you think of that example – and I’ll be the first to admit that it’s a little “clumsy,” although  the iPhone placement really does resolve the tension in a nice way – I think we can all agree that the potential here is limitless (note to the Estate of J.D. Salinger: not bad, eh? Let’s talk).

Now, wait, wait, I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking well you have a point, product placement might be a very viable way for authors to further “monetize” their prose. But, what about actual ads? That seems like it would be going too far.

And I agree: it would be going too far. In a good way. What better way to “mentally prepare” yourself to read a classic like Nightwood than a 30-second Gap ad? Or let’s say you’re into classics: ready to read Aristotle’s Poetics? Not until you’ve watched a trailer for the DVD boxed set of Rome! And yes, I know Aristotle was Greek, okay, but: both in the Mediterranean, both old, it’s all the same in terms of target audiences, target demographics, is what I’m saying here.

There are, of course, a few kinks to be worked out. I don’t really know the specifics, but I’m told that books, in paper form, don’t currently support Microsoft Silverlight, or any of the other proprietary streaming-video software currently out there which I’m not being paid to mention by name, so won’t. That’s a problem, obviously, but since everyone’s going to be reading e-books on their Apple iPads in like two years anyway, I’m not sure it makes sense to tackle this problem. But: glossy inserts? Why not? Maybe it’s crazy, I don’t know. Maybe I’m crazy.

In closing, let me say this: poetry. I know, I know, no one reads poetry. But that just means, for advertisers, pennies on the dollar. Pennies on the dollar here, people. To prove my point, I had a little séance with the spirit of good Mr. Allen Ginsberg (not on a first name basis with him, sadly), and here’s what he had to say:

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Xanax, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the Staples Center at dawn looking for a Big Mac,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to Xbox LIVE.”

Potential. That’s what that is. Pure, unadulterated potential. And I know it paints Xanax in a bad light, but that’s because Pfizer, or should I say Pfskinflints, refused to fork over the dollars for a nice little product placement. Screw you, Pfcheapskates!

So: over and out, until next time when I’ll be discussing the pros and cons (note: there are no cons) of having a company logo permanently tattooed on your forehead.

In the hospital room’s white
indifference, a small girl waits
while gloved hands unravel layers
of gauze from her eyes.
She will see for the first time
the objects we’ve limited
through naming. The gauze falls,
light enters her pupils, diffracts
like ribbons falling
in an empty room.
She steps to the window
where a city sparkles a million
reflections of sunlight. And there,
against the morning skyline,
a plane veers, smashes into
that great tower. Without a sound,
a breath of fire spews
into immaculate blue.
Each flame a blossom rising
into slow rivers of smoke.
She imagines that this
is the image of music
as she presses her nose to the glass
and says without blinking Mommy,
you were right. This world
is beautiful.

Born in 1988 in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong currently resides in New York City as an undergraduate English Major at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His poems have received an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Beatrice Dubin Rose Award, the Connecticut Poetry Society’s Al Savard Award, as well as two Pushcart Prize nominations. His work appear in Word Riot, the Kartika Review, Lantern Review, SOFTBLOW, Asia Literary Review, and PANK among others. He enjoys practicing Zen Meditation and is an avid supporter of animal rights. More poems at www.oceanvuong.blogspot.com

So Sayeth the Article:

“More than 85% of hiring managers and human-resource executives said they feel that millennials have a stronger sense of entitlement than older workers, according to a survey by CareerBuilder.com. The generation’s greatest expectations: higher pay (74% of respondents); flexible work schedules (61%); a promotion within a year (56%); and more vacation or personal time (50%).”

Now, I’d like to pause here for a moment.  The article goes on and makes a wealth of other points (most of which are, from my perspective at least, just as stodgy and cantankerous as this), but when I read this article, this was the segment that caused the greatest stir in me.  Let’s say that these statistics are true - that we are a generation who wants to be paid more, wants a flexible schedule, promotions, vacations, etc.  Is that necessarily a bad thing?  Did I embody the ugliness of my generation when I stared blankly into my computer screen and responded to these statistics with a hazy, “Well… duh”?

On the one hand, this intellectual impasse is certainly an issue of audience.  I’m a 29 year old college adjunct with long hair and occasionally tight pants.  My interest in the economy is social, not financial.  This article is clearly written for someone unlike myself - someone who owns more than two ties.  I envision a silver-haired gentleman in a three-piece suit who’s a complete grouchpants.  I’m sure he read this article back in 2008 and groused all afternoon about how this country’s going to Hell in a handbasket.  Silver-haired suit man would glower at a guy like me.

But there’s something deeper than an audience gap going on here - there’s something bigger that conjures this article’s duh-ness for me - and it’s entirely generational (N.B.: I use that term very loosely, considering my race, gender and socio-economic status).  Because absolutely, these statistics bespeak a tremendous sense of entitlement that I and many others like me have been born into.  Thanks to the hard work and rough choices of those who came before, many of us can afford (both figuratively and literally) to be picky in our work - to find a job that feels right, rather than just getting one to ward off starvation.

From the earliest age, people like me have been asked by our parents and our teachers what it was we wanted to become, and then if we were lucky, we were helped along the way toward that end.  The whole of our early lives was a giant machine designed to make of us whatever it was we desired.  That’s a pretty entitled lifestyle right there.  It’s a part of us.  And that’s why it feels so natural - that’s why when reading that article, I found myself nodding rather than shaking my head.  Because the article is right: I am entitled.

So here’s my question:  Is that a bad thing?

Isn’t entitlement what we as a people - hell, as a species - are essentially striving for?  The ability to have greater choice - the freedom not to have to do something we find distasteful?

More bliss.  Less toil.

It sounds good to me.  I think everyone should get to be as entitled as I was.

Or might things have gone too far?  Have we as a people grown so ripe, so heavy with entitlement that we’ve gone soft and mealy.  Are we bad apples, like the Wall Street Journal seems to be suggesting?

It’s a complicated subject, I think.  So I ask you, lovely reader, to debate it here with me, and with each other.  Post a comment.  Take a stand.  Share your opinion loudly - if for no other reason than to annoy the Wall Street Journal, which seems to find our ease at self-expression quite bothersome.

Personally, when it comes to expression, I think you’re entitled…

(see what I did there?)

Andrew Panebianco holds a BA in English Literature and a MA in Writing Studies from Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Antioch University.  He is the nonfiction editor of The Splinter Generation, and is a regular contributor to The Nervous Breakdown.  He lives in New Jersey and works as a higher-education mercenary at several Philadelphia-area universities.

My secret desire to rap began somewhere in the awkwardness of high school when I heard a couple of older kids rapping along to the Minneapolis based hip-hop group Atmosphere: “I’m bigger than Jesus and bigger than wrestling, bigger than the Beatles, and bigger than breast implants. I’m gonna be the biggest thing to hit these little kids; bigger than guns, bigger than tsigarretsss.”

For years I’d hummed this tune, imagining myself on a hugely lit stage coolly flat lining my hand out from my waist and towards the audience as I hiss that last word, “tsigarretsss.”

The closest I’ve ever gotten to actually rapping in front of any audience bigger than the soap and shampoo in my shower has been the two times I performed at my high-school’s annual poetry slam contest. I came near close to winning the thing my senior year with a poem I wrote specifically for it. It went something like: “Honestly, honest to God, honest to all that is will be and ever was, honestly girl…”

Yeah.

In the lecture hall that day, black skinny jeans (perhaps the most un-rap attire ever), slip-on Vans, and a black hoodie shrouding my face, a mike in one hand and the poem in the other, I hit high-school rap glory for about five minutes, or at least as close as I could get to it in my soap bubble private school world, or at least as much as I dreamt I had. Although in the next round I didn’t win, I took pride in being the “sensitive” rapper, the honest, letting it all hang out Eminem word magician. I always had a love of poetry, but this was far better. Performing got me out of the teenage emotionality harbored in my bedroom and into a space where people listened.

If you’ve ever stood in front of an audience and given a speech, you’ll know what it felt like. If you’ve ever given a speech to a bunch of high school kids who are praying that you’re not going to make them wish they’d spent their lunch break not listening to you, and walked away from the podium feeling like you’ve just walked out of the desert after wandering in search of food and water for three weeks, you know how I felt.

Something came out that I’d neglected for a while. Maybe it was an expression of the social frustration that I’d experienced all through high school. Maybe it was me finally coming closer to being up on that stage, gaining some sliver of recognition for a craft. In reality, it was probably some confused feelings for a girl, masked by my naive sense of poetry.

Either way I felt more confident. Not just during, but afterwards, too.

My hip-hop dreams didn’t last. I moved on. I don’t want to be a rapper anymore, just like I don’t want to be an NCAA lacrosse champion. I’ve moved on to other things. But ever since, that memory has been coming back to me, sometimes in moments where I need to relive the boost I felt that day and sometimes in moments that make me question what on earth I was doing. I know one thing for certain though – I would have never known until I tried. And that makes me laugh. Who knows? Maybe I’d be the biggest thing to hit your little kids, bigger than guns, bigger than tsigarretsss.

Jeremy Dossetter is a first time Intern for Splinter Generation straight out of his first year at Kenyon College in rural Ohio where he studies English. He enjoys riding bikes long distances and photographing with film. His favorite poem is “If” by Rudyard Kipling. He currently lives in San Francisco.

I saw Julie & Julie in the theatres with my mother. As we walked out she exclaimed, “I should do a blog. I could write about something.” I was in the second month of my very first blog, and quietly thought, oh sure, anyone can blog. It’s so easy. Just look at my two meager entries (one being the ever essential, “My blog will be about XYZ”). Simple.

The first time I saw the movie, two things struck me: 1. the food, the shot of her and her husband crunching into a fresh batch of bruschetta stays with me still; 2. the mind-crushing schedule necessary to write a near-daily blog. On such a demanding regime, I’m sure the blog can seem to take over your life. What will the next entry be about? What if you have nothing to say? What if you don’t feel like cooking? The “What ifs” have the ability to handicap a newbie blogger, and I was impressed with Julie Powell’s spit-into-the-wind attitude toward her doubt.

The second time I saw Julie & Julia was after it was released on DVD. I watched it on my laptop via Netflix Instant Watch. Upon the second viewing two different things struck me: 1. Julia Child was a charming and amazing woman; 2. Julie Powell is entitled and self-involved. For everything that was wonderful about Julia Child—being a loving wife and thoughtful friend, a dedicated writer and self-demanding student—Julie Powell, at least in the movie, embodies the opposite. She is cruel to her husband, is a whiner, and a user.

Julia worked for years on her cookbook with little to no hope of it being published, let alone becoming a success. She taught herself a craft—cooking—insisted on doing it well, and chose to help others do the same. Julie is not a very good cook, and never claims to be. She is not an extraordinarily talented writer, and never claims to be. Julie’s talent is found in her ability to latch on to a figure and use it. As far as I can tell, Julie Powell’s admiration for Julia Child is self-serving; She doesn’t care for the real Julia, as much for the one she created. The one that serves her own life story, her blog, and ultimately her career and financial gain.

Maybe I’m being harsh. And maybe these harsh judgments of Julie Powell stem from the fact I watched her writing transgressions from the window of my laptop. My own blog site minimized in the corner, I was forced to face an uncomfortable and frightening question: Am I not the same? Am I an ungrateful blogger?

The answer: an unenthusiastic, yes?

I watched the movie and marveled at life in Julia’s generation. These were a strong stock of people (having lived through WWII and the McCarthy Era); these were a patient people. Information took longer; it took time. They wrote careful letters to pen pals they never met. They wrote painful love letters. They had relationships, real relationships that were nurtured over many years. Books took time, written on typewriters and edited by carbon paper. There were no laptops. No WIFI in the café. No Facebook. No Blogger. Social networking was a face-to-face affair. And with no virtual life, real life spent time and people cared about quality.

Today’s bloggers, like Julie Powell and myself, have the ability to get an idea and near-instantly put it out into the world. There is no cultivating. It is instant gratification. The light bulb turns on and we don’t care to dress it or shade it. We let it burn bright and hope the people in the wide world will notice, read it, comment (we live for comments, nay need them). And we feel accomplished. But are we?

And now due to the success of the earlier blogs like The Julie/Julia project, these virtual brain rants can lead to a book (and for a lucky one or two a movie). This is a legitimate hope. If my blog is noticed, if my idea is wild enough, catchy enough, resonates with enough faces peering into the same world window, I might get a book deal. Isn’t that one reason why many of us blog? Is this too shameful a secret to share? Don’t we do it to get our names out, widen our readership, and beef up our Google resumes? (Did I say that?)

It’s no wonder Julia Child didn’t want to meet Julie Powell. Julia had to work her ass off over many years (of course she did have the comfort of a wealthy and supportive spouse), whereas Powell had an idea one night, instantaneously began baring these thoughts to the world, and received serious book offers within a year. A year!

In such a faced-paced forum for writing where is the space needed for art, introspection, and beauty? I fear there isn’t any.

It is said that Julia Child didn’t care for the blog. She didn’t appreciate Julie’s love of the ef-word, and found it to be a stunt. I worry that many blogs are a stunt. Do we, the bloggers, write for the sake of language and art, or for the sake of readers, comments, and book deals? Watching Julie & Julia a second time I realized that I just might be an ungrateful, ef-bombing blogger, but I aspire to be a Julia Child.

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is a poet, Splinter editor, literary curator, and soon-to-be (once again) educator. You can read more of her work at xochitljulisa.blogspot.com. She assures you she recognizes the irony of plugging her blog.

Which is why it’s so good. It brought me right into its trap. It got me thinking that I could go out and paint a huge piece on a wall or make a couple hundred stickers or some stencils and post them all over a city. Or start a blog of street art photography and create an exhibit and sell prints, or, whatever…If I wanted to, I could.

At one point Banksy says that he doesn’t know what art is, doesn’t know if one way to artistic fame or freedom is as valid as another. And he’s right.

Coming out of the theater I felt like I was given a new pair of eyes. Exit Through the Gift Shop made me not only want to take in everything around me as if I’d been told I only had 24 hours to live but also made me want to get on my feet and go discover a whole new world separate from the one I’d obliviously fallen into as an observer. I was treated with a reminder of how much my surroundings affect my sense of being and what and how I think and I wanted to change.

Jeremy Dossetter is a first time Intern for Splinter Generation straight out of his first year at Kenyon College in rural Ohio where he studies English. He enjoys riding bikes long distances and photographing with film. His favorite poem is “If” by Rudyard Kipling. He currently lives in San Francisco.

I.
Beside the boulevard staircase
a sepia flower woman sits, sells
stalks for a nickel, answers you
vacantly, the way a cat might
or mightn’t. Looking at her sideways
one can tell she’s tatters and forgotten.
Two boys walk by, spinning jibes, pocketed
knife sits heavy sidelong to occult
powders—startled when she stands,
watching them pass with tears, and foggy
begins shouting, “Antonio! Antonio, Antonio!”
Guilty brownstones watching, they, anonymous,
ignore her, as she screams after them,
a rheumy gurgle, “Antonio!”

II.
Like every morning, guzzled,
carried by the throng into the subway
berth. His tie is uncomfortable, the crisp,
undaunted whiteness of the shirt irritates
his pores and marrow. Excitement is empty
staplers. But when he sleeps, he remembers
the forest, and the grunting of brothers
and sisters, naked, unashamed of rough curls
of chests and groins. He remembers the pine
needles, balsam odor a primeval lullaby.
When the alarm screams next to his ears,
he screws his lids shut. He digs his teeth
into the downy pillow, something savage.

III.
In her drawer at home, her collection
of keys: brass, tin, tarnished silver.
When the men slide off of her, enter the dim
bathroom to clean off, penises purple
and angry, she finds her fingers in their pockets,
massaging the cold rings, slipping the key off,
holding it secret. The men don’t notice—
she wonders if they’ve seen her at all. They know
enough to leave a crumple of bills next to the mirror.
She doesn’t know why she does it; maybe to imagine
when he’ll reach the door, and after searching,
will form on his lips one furious syllable.

Matthew Ostapchuk is a graduate of Chester College of New England and the editor of Two-Bit Magazine. His work has also appeared in OVS Magazine, Collective Fallout, and Soundzine. He will be pursuing his MFA at Hollins University starting this fall.

Planning a wedding can at times seem the equivalent of pawning our mothers’ burnt bras to finance a boob job. Or trading in a Donna Karan power suit for a Donna Reed apron. The inner feminist who rages at glass ceilings and the indignities of pantyhose in July (and knows, by the way, that no feminist brassiere was ever actually lit afire) turns suddenly demure in the face of handmade glass earrings and twenty pounds of white taffeta in August. Currently planning a wedding myself, I have been surprised at my own susceptibility to the bride-as-princess vision that is the ageless dream of five-year-olds across America. Surprised also at the flash of regret when I removed the lace-encrusted wedding gown, complete with three-foot train, and said weakly, “I said I wouldn’t wear white at my wedding.” And even more at the alacrity with which I accepted the salesclerk’s card when she suggested the dress could be ordered in ivory.

The decision not to wear white at my wedding, along with the decision to reject the traditional ceremony, was made in the instant I began to think about my nuptials—not agonized over or set upon after researching web sites boasting ideas for “alternative” weddings (the existence of such events being questionable anyhow, since even a can of Campbell’s soup as a table favor is still a table favor). No, these decisions were automatic, definitive, obvious: I would not wear white to my wedding just as I would not wear a leopard-print leotard to work. Nor would I wear a veil, be given away, take my husband’s last name, or allow scripture celebrating Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib anywhere near my ceremony.

Yet having these convictions in the face of the beast that is the modern wedding is not simple. Becoming the bride-to-be has a strange power—blame it on a Disney hex of sorts, or perhaps a bridal spirit that is the collective, inexorable push of female ancestors whose weddings were likely the only indulgence of their lives. Whatever it is, I have discovered that the only thing more difficult than balancing ideas of feminism—or even individuality—with wedding planning is talking to other women about my rationale for shirking tradition without making them feel bad about their own ivory taffeta.
Typically one to ride the girltalk bandwagon until the last Beaujolais is emptied, I have found myself suddenly self-censoring to the point where the only person to whom I speak freely about my wedding plans is my fiancé, to whom quibbles over white dresses and the absurdity of garter belts are met with mild and exasperatingly pragmatic agreement. He, after all, has not been entrenched in traditions that herald the wedding day as the most important of a woman’s life: her chance to play Barbie on a life-size scale.

So, to all of you—my friends and acquaintances and now readers who have been insulted by my disparagement of your special day: Let me explain.

My argument with the traditional wedding arose in graduate school. Not in a sociology course or a class on feminist theory, but while preparing for the dreaded foreign language translation exam that every master’s candidate in the humanities must pass. For months, I pored over inexplicable Xeroxes of French history and literary criticism. There is no textual intimacy like translation, I learned as I inspected each stray ink blot to determine if it was in fact an accent aigu. The remnants of two (poorly) translated practice exams are still scrawled in my old notebook: one on the merits of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the other an essay about marriage. The title of the marriage essay escapes me, but an accurate translation could have been “Why Marriage Was Better When Women Were Property.” As I also neglected to note the author’s name, the true identity of this dear man will remain forever unknown, but it is probable that “Why Marriage Was Better” was written by Likely Fat and Ugly Frenchman, Sr.

I imagine Monsieur Frenchman as the worst type of unrequited lover—a kind of antipode of Petrarch. I see him hunched over his desk with a snifter of cheap cognac, petting his patchy goatee and fuming over the repudiation he has suffered at the hands of the fortunate Frenchwoman who realized he would have been a wretched husband. Only the most incorrigible of spurned lovers could argue for the merits of marriage as a loveless material arrangement with such venomous glee.

The beginning of this lovely essay was a lesson not only in translating intolerably stuffy French prose, but also a primer in the history of marriage traditions and their representation. In fastidious detail, monsieur describes the marriage preparations and ceremony undertaken by an ancient Roman bride. Most of these, with the exception of combing the hair “with a sharp spearhead in the form of a needle as a sign of consecration to Juno” found their way into the contemporary (if we can call it that) wedding ceremony. The typical Roman bride was given an engagement ring, wore a white dress and a veil, was carried across the threshold of her husband’s home, and shared cake with her husband at their marriage celebration. Sound familiar?

There is a large gap in my translation, which likely means that the interior sections were obscured by a train of eight-syllable words and too much passé composé, but I picked up again when Fat and Ugly Frenchman relocated his discussion of marriage in more recent history and launched into a treatise on why marriage was better when it was for practical agreement rather than love. These good old days of marriage-as-female-servitude ended when the rowdy post-World War I (yes—I, not II) generation decided to marry for love rather than pragmatism or family mandate. An excerpt from our dear monsieur describing the horror of the state of this “current” matrimony follows:
He will work ten, twelve hours a day. But she will complain because she has more work at home, and because “it is more difficult.” If he has a brain, he will think that if his wife knew how to organize her housework, she would have even more spare time than she had. But since he is kind, he will say nothing. He will prepare his coffee himself before going to work.

I won’t vouch for the most elegant translation, but you understand his general point.
I will never know how the beginning and ends of M. Frenchman’s essay actually fit together; in place of his connections between past and present there is just a huge blank in my notebook. However, his structural progression is as clear as his abhorrence of modernity and women: Monsieur began in ancient Rome with an exaltation of tradition and wound up in the early 20th century with the ways in which tradition have been flouted and undermined (to the detriment of men, of course.)

But in fact, monsieur was wrong. Though on the surface it may have seemed that the good old days were crumbling before him, he lived—and we live—in a world so entrenched in tradition and the past that we can barely see them—their pervasiveness has rendered them almost invisible. We know the various scripts of tradition as if by birthright, and we play our roles to perfection. When it comes to the marriage ceremony, we all know what to wear, when to clap, when to say that the bride and the groom make a smashing couple, and when it’s appropriate to take our leave. We are so aware of the script and everyone’s part in it that we are often befuddled when one of the actors flubs his or her part.

For instance, the admission that I’m not wearing white to my wedding is met with either accolades for being “different” or confusion at why I would ever consider such an idea. There is something odd about both. First, that in a culture that has become so diverse and, in many ways, resistant to the status quo, people think it is really that “different” to wear color on one’s wedding day. And second, that the repudiation of said tradition is so preposterous to others in the exact same culture and of remarkably similar persuasions.
Among the latter was Francesca, the super-chic woman who manages the scandalously overpriced bridal boutique where I searched for my wedding outfit. When I told her I was getting married but was not looking for a white dress, a bemused look scudded across her powdered face like a cloud. It was smoothed over with a forced brightness as she marched me into a dressing room and began tossing gown after colorful gown across the top of the dressing-room door. In the midst of figuring out that the floor-length taffeta number I was trying to tug up my hips had hidden zippers, Francesca knocked discreetly at the door and ducked inside, not bothering to wait for an invitation to come in. Totally oblivious to any desire for modesty on my part and deftly ignoring the fact that I was stuck in one of her expensive gowns, Francesca leaned forward knowingly and whispered, with what she must have assumed was discretion, “If it’s the money, we have some very reasonably priced bridal gowns.”

Half-naked and ankle-deep in a flounce of brightly-colored satins and silks, I didn’t feel like explaining that though I was indeed ethically opposed to paying $5,000 for any gown, it was not the price tag of a designer dress that had me shivering among the detritus of rejected dresses. “It’s not the money,” I simply said, not willing to step onto my soapbox at the bridal boutique. “I just don’t want to wear white.”

In the nine months of my engagement, I have developed three stock responses for reactions similar to that from Francesca: (1) an abrupt “I don’t like what white stands for” followed by a swift change of subject; or, if I feel that this is overly pedantic, the cop-out: (2) “I don’t look good in white.” If I’m looking to end the discussion with no further questions, I resort to the response I gave to her: (3) “I just don’t want to.”

But the actual answer—totally inappropriate for a barely-clothed conversation at the bridal store—is this: I spent enough time looking up each of dear Fat and Ugly Frenchman’s words that I had to dwell with them, word by tedious French word. And what I came to was a realization that every wedding I had attended had been a mishmash of ritual and custom that had been mimed and replicated with devoted and perhaps even admirable solemnity, but not real deliberation. That most weddings were a going-through-the-motions of customs and practices that had come before, which were inevitably mimicking another what-had-come-before from a more distant before.
Of course I knew then just as we all know deep down in the gray matter that most of the marriage ceremony has its roots in cultural and religious beliefs prescribed by societies distant to us now. Modern wedding-goers know, for instance, that the white gown represents the purity of the bride (though this representation was only popularized in the 20th century) and that the father walking the bride down the aisle is an old vestige of the days of arranged marriages, when the father would pass the goods (that’s us, gals) from one man to another. But to know this in the back of our minds theoretically and philosophically and then to simply ignore it as the bride walks demurely down the aisle is the equivalent of roasting a Christmas boar at a vegetarian Christmas brunch. The problem with the customs and rituals surrounding the celebration of marriage is not that there is an inherent flaw in observing tradition, but that the traditions of the marriage celebration represent practices that at one time or another have made women their casualties. By incorporating them into our ceremonies, we are, in essence, paying homage to the very conventions that marginalized us for centuries. Despite what we may think or want to think, tradition and ritual can’t be divested of their meaning—it’s always there somewhere, the residue of the past making an oily stain on someone’s white chiffon.

The white dress is hard to resist: As any woman who has been into a bridal store can tell you, there is something amazingly seductive about wearing a dress that costs more than your rent and watching yourself transform into the vision you saw as a little girl: the icon of beauty, attention, and femininity we have all seen hundreds of times. It holds a powerful allure—the feeling that we are fulfilling the same ritual that our mothers and grandmothers and friends and sisters have performed before us. But—while I don’t think it is exceptionally “different” to wear a colorful dress to one’s wedding (women did it for centuries between the Romans and the Victorians, after all)—there is something richly defiant in relegating the white dress to the past. In not replicating or embodying or signifying—to the extent that is possible—and in so doing carving out a space for new meaning, or no meaning at all.

Fat and Ugly Frenchman convinced me that, as I was one of those renegade post-World War I kids who would marry for love, I would have a ceremony that was wholly about me and my husband-to-be and not merely a rote replication of rituals that have been invested and divested and ascribed with meaning again and again and again. And that the past wouldn’t be the guest no one wanted to invite who got drunk and puked on the cake. There are uncles for that. I decided that I would celebrate my marriage without the vestiges of tradition—no white, no veil, no giving away, and no spear-combed hair. And with beauty (in navy blue satin, as it turns out) on the side.

Sarah Landenwich is a writer from Louisville, Kentucky. She currently lives in Boulder, Colorado, where she works as a freelance editor and adjunct composition instructor. She holds an MA in English from the University of Louisville.

Editors’ Note: Back in their spring/summer issue,

And then she said yes! This is the second of those poems. The first, Religion by Amy Motlagh, can be found here.

Below is a poem by Mandana Zandian.

The State of Red

The stairway of our house was narrow
the stairway of our house was supposed to be
a place for hide-and-seek, for running up and down.
It was supposed to be white,
gleaming like the Milky Way.

The stairway of our house
was supposed to always laugh.

* * *

The air raid siren was red.
The siren cursed our stairway,
sullied it with darkness, dirt, and stench.
The siren smelled of hate.

* * *

The stairway of our house,
in its fear of the siren, collapsed
into itself and became a deep well,
dark, empty and dry,
and inside it my dreams birthed headless nightmares
wrapped in layers of sounds—howls of jets and wolves.
My mother would press her head
against the stairway roof,
her pulse pounding in her eyes,
terrified lest she fall and be trampled
under our neighbor’s pious feet—
the same neighbor who praised God incessantly
for the war’s boundless bounties.

And my father would shoot my hands
with the bullets of his eyes
all the way from the war at the border
so that he would not forget how young
I was, dying beside my dolls.

And Tehran…
never imagined it would become this red.
Its red sky and red earth
rumbled and quaked like thunder,
attacked our stairway with fury.

But tomorrow was always a new day!
A day where the earth became pregnant
with new parts of my classmates’ dismembered arms.
A day of twenty new lies I could slurp up in our history class—
and our school believed it could look for shelter
during the geography lesson,
and God…
God always yawned.

— translated by Sholeh Wolpé

Mandana Zandian was born on March 1972 in Isfahan, Iran. She is the author of four volumes of poetry. After graduating from medical school in 2000, she moved to Los Angeles, where she is currently living with her family.

Sholeh Wolpé is the author of Rooftops of Tehran, The Scar Saloon, and Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad for which she was awarded the Lois Roth Translation Prize in 2010 by the American Institute of Iranian Studies. Sholeh is the associate editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East edited by Reza Aslan (Norton), the guest editor of Atlanta Review (2010 Iran issue) and the poetry editor of the Levantine Review, an online journal about the Middle East.

I was joking with a friend the other day about what would happen if we could give a peasant from the Middle Ages a Macbook. I’m pretty sure they’d deal with it in the same way Zoolander does in the scene where he tries to extract the files that are “in the computer.” They’d smash the hell out of it.

I kind of want to do that too, but I don’t. The reason I don’t is that, unlike my fictional peasant and Hollywood’s Zoolander, I’ve been trained my whole life to understand and accept the rationale behind the computers I use everyday to the point where they no longer represent anything extraordinary. I’ve been around computers ever since I can remember. In the third grade my school taught me to type. They gave me a laptop in the fifth and showed me how to create a simple website in the sixth. It went on all the way until graduation.

Which has been great given how necessary tech knowledge is, but something is wrong. Computers, and specifically the Internet, make me feel like a robot. The Internet just bombards me with too much stuff. Yes, there’s a wealth of intellectual, veritable knowledge (within?) the Internet, but only alongside any number of various links, ads, apps, and blinking doodads, so that I can’t even get anything done anymore because all I want to do is absorb myself in the thick of it. I can’t tell you how many times the process of writing has taken me far longer than it should, demanded much more forced concentration, and been a harder battle to fight because the Web has lured me in. In the midst of final exams, papers, and projects for school, I’ve even tried giving myself time limits and found that I have the ability to far exceed those before I even know it, even under pressure.

Just like a potent drug, or maybe even a crazed zombie, the Internet is eating my brain. Morning coffee is never without a computer by its side. Reading books and magazines has become harder and harder because my laptop always sits nearby. I can’t even watch TV anymore without being tempted to get on the Internet. Checking e-mail, Facebook, forums, blogs, and a ton of other websites has become an obsession. Got some down time while waiting for someone to meet you? Type something into Doctor Google…Maybe it’ll tell you why you keep getting all those headaches or why you can’t concentrate on certain things as well as you used to.

Truth is, I’m scared of the Internet. I’m not going to stop using it, because quite frankly, I want to use it. I enjoy it. All I’m going to do is try to re-fill the ice cream scoop that I feel has been taken out of my brain so far by the wispy, diluted bits and pieces that I take in from the Internet with more information that really has an impact on me, that makes me think more often instead of observe. I need a more carefully balanced diet of the Internet’s virtual proteins, dairy, and vitamins to feel better. I’ve been thinking of getting a subscription to the New Yorker’s online archives. Maybe that’ll help. I want to get rid of all the scattered tendencies the Internet’s bestowed upon me, and replace them with real, substantive matter.

Jeremy Dossetter is a first time Intern for Splinter Generation straight out of his first year at Kenyon College in rural Ohio where he studies English. He enjoys riding bikes long distances and photographing with film. His favorite poem is “If” by Rudyard Kipling. He currently lives in San Francisco.